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The PSNet Collection: All Content

The AHRQ PSNet Collection comprises an extensive selection of resources relevant to the patient safety community. These resources come in a variety of formats, including literature, research, tools, and Web sites. Resources are identified using the National Library of Medicine’s Medline database, various news and content aggregators, and the expertise of the AHRQ PSNet editorial and technical teams.

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Displaying 1 - 20 of 2066 Results
WebM&M Case November 30, 2023

A 67-year-old man with well-controlled type 2 diabetes mellitus underwent elective cardiac resynchronization and defibrillator device (CRT-D) implantation. The procedure was successful and he was discharged the next day with instructions to resume his prior medications, including empagliflozin. He presented to the emergency department the following day where he was diagnosed with euglycemic diabetic ketoacidosis (eDKA) and he was transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU) for insulin infusion.

WebM&M Case November 30, 2023

A 38-year-old woman with class 3 obesity required removed of a gastric balloon under general anesthesia. She required a relatively large dose of rocuronium for endotracheal intubation, and she was given intravenous sugammadex (200 mg) at the end of the procedure to reverse the neuromuscular block. A quantitative neuromuscular block monitor was not used, but reliance was placed on clinical signs. Shortly after arrival in the post-anesthesia care unit, she couldn’t move or open her eyes and became jittery with low oxygen saturation.

WebM&M Case November 30, 2023

An 81-year-old man was admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) with a gastrointestinal bleed and referred for a diagnostic colonoscopy. The nurse preparing the patient for the colonoscopy mistakenly selected a jug of dialysis liquid rather than a polyethylene glycol solution commonly used to clean the colon for colonoscopy. When the barcode on the jug of dialysis liquid did not scan, the nurse called the hospital pharmacy for assistance and was provided a new barcode via a tube system.

WebM&M Case November 29, 2023

This case describes a 55-year-old woman who sustained critical injuries after a motor vehicle crash and had a lengthy hospitalization. On hospital day 30, a surgeon placed a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube in the intensive care unit (ICU) after computed tomography (CT) scan showed no interposed bowel between the stomach and the anterior abdominal wall.  After the uncomplicated PEG placement, the surgeon cleared the patient’s team to advance tube feeds as tolerated.

Anaesth Intensive Care. 2023;51(6):372-421.

Centralized de-identified reports of patient safety events serve a core purpose for learning and improvement. This article collection contains research drawn from the Australian/New Zealand webAIRS database. Data reviewed include cesarean and pediatric regional anesthesia incidents submitted to webAIRS over a 13-year period.
Lim PJH, Chen L, Siow S, et al. Int J Qual Health Care. 2023;35:mzad086.
Surgical safety checklists (SCC) are utilized around the world, but checklist completion at the operating room level remains inconsistent. This review summarizes facilitators and barriers to completion. Resistance or endorsement at the individual surgeon level remains a significant factor in SSC completion. Early inclusion of frontline staff in evaluation and implementation supported increased use.
MohammadiGorji S, Joseph A, Mihandoust S, et al. HERD. 2023;Epub Aug 8.
Well-designed workspaces minimize disruptions and distractions. This review and study describes several important ways to improve the anesthesia workspace in the operating room. Recommendations include demarcating an anesthesia zone with adequate space for equipment and storage and that restricts unnecessary staff travel into and through the zone. Each recommendation includes an illustrative diagram, explains its importance, and offers methods to achieve it.

Arnal-Velasco, D, ed. Curr Opin Anaesthesiol. 2023;36(6):649-705.

Adoption of new ideas is necessary to create safety in the perioperative environment. This collection of reviews illustrates relationships and tensions between technology, human factors and safety management that create the sociotechnical system within which technology is used to deliver anesthesia. Topics covered include artificial intelligence, decision making and perioperative deterioration.
Milic V, Cameron L, Jones C. Br J Nurs. 2023;32:840-848.
Double checking of medication administration one strategy meant to reduce medication errors. In this study, 29 critical care nurses took part in a focus group exploring the barriers to double-checking during medication administration. Participants discussed several challenges, such as patient location (particularly for patients in isolation due to infection control measure), health IT limitations, and unclear roles and responsibilities.
Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2023;Epub Oct 18.
Surgical fires are a rare yet potentially harmful event for both patients and care teams. The alert provides reduction guidance for organizations to mitigate conditions that enable surgical fires and suggests tactics to improve communication as a primary strategy for preventing this potentially catastrophic accident in operating rooms.

McEvoy MD, Abernathy JH, 3rd. Anesthesiol Clin. 2023;41(4):xvii-xix;693-886.

Organizational, unit, and team culture affect the safety of surgical care. This special issue examines overarching principles, common practices, and practical actions that support safe perioperative processes and settings. Topics discussed include team dynamics, operating room design, and high reliability.
Sutcliffe KM. Anesthesiol Clin. 2023;41:707-717.
Achieving high reliability remains difficult for many organizations. This article provides a brief history of the concept of high reliability organizations (HROs) and key features of high reliability culture, such as fostering trust and respect among teams and creating systems and processes to elicit feedback/reflections and identify opportunities for improvement. The authors discuss these concepts in the setting of anesthesiology and perioperative care.
WebM&M Case October 31, 2023

A 2-year-old girl presented to the emergency department (ED) with joint swelling and rash following an upper respiratory infection. After receiving treatment and being discharged with a diagnosis of allergic urticaria, she returned the following day with worsening symptoms. Suspecting an allergic reaction to amoxicillin, the ED team prepared to administer methylprednisolone. However, the ED intake technician erroneously switched the patient’s height and weight in the electronic health record (EHR), resulting in an excessive dose being ordered and dispensed.

Washington, DC: The Veterans Affairs Inspector General. October 4, 2023. Report No. 23-00080-227.

Wrong-site surgery and unintentionally retained surgical items are considered never events. This report details five wrong-site surgeries and three instances of retained surgical items at one VA medical center between 2018 and 2022. The findings suggest that timely investigation into events from 2018-2021 may have prevented three incidents in 2022. Additionally, the medical center failed to fully report the provider responsible for three of the wrong-site surgeries.
Ramjaun A, Hammond Mobilio M, Wright N, et al. Ann Surg. 2023;278:e1142-e1147.
Situational awareness is an essential component of teamwork. This qualitative study examined how situational awareness and team culture impact intraoperative handoff practice. Researchers found that participants often assumed that team members are interchangeable and that trained staff should be able to determine handoff appropriateness without having to consult the larger operating room team – both of these assumptions hinder team communication and situational awareness.
Klopotowska JE, Leopold J‐H, Bakker T, et al. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2023;Epub Aug 11.
Identifying and preventing drug-drug interactions (DDI) is critical to patient safety, but the usual method of detecting DDI and other errors - manual chart review - is resource intensive. This study describes the use of an e-trigger to pre-select charts for review that are more likely to include one of three DDIs, thus reducing the overall number of charts needing review. Two of the DDI e-triggers had high positive predictive values (0.76 and 0.57), demonstrating that e-triggers can be a useful method to pre-selecting charts for manual review.
Moyal-Smith R, Etheridge JC, Turley N, et al. BMJ Qual Saf. 2023;Epub Sep 21.
Implementation challenges can hinder the effectiveness of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC). This study describes the validation of the Checklist Performance Observation for Improvement (CheckPOINT) tool to assess SSC implementation fidelity. Based on testing in simulated and real-life clinical practice, researchers found that that the tool can reliably assess implementation fidelity and identify opportunities for improvement.
Castro R da NS de, Aguiar LB de, Volpe CRG, et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023;20:6788.
Medication errors not only harm patients and increase hospital length of stay, but they are also an economic burden to patients and the health system. This study describes the types of medication errors and related costs in a Brazilian adult intensive care unit (ICU). The most common error type was omission, accounting for half of all errors. Scheduling and prescription errors were significantly correlated with increased hospitalization costs. Additionally, some medication doses contained more than one error type, driving up costs even further.
Bagian JP, Paull DE, DeRosier JM. Surg Open Sci. 2023;16:33-36.
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires post-graduate education to include patient safety curriculum. This article describes the development and evaluation of a curriculum for residents on patient safety investigations using the Root Cause Analysis and Action (RCA2) model. Residents were surveyed at least one year after completion of the training. Sixty-three percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed residents should be provided with the RCA2 training and nearly half reported having participated on an RCA team since completing the program.